Atmospheric scattering can involve the interaction of light photons with materials in the atmosphere such as fog, clouds, suspended aerosols and other individual gas molecules. Thus, atmospheric scattering effects could be relevant to visually intensive computer graphics applications such as 3D (3-dimensional) computer games, flight simulators and other 3D imaging systems.
Conventional approaches to simulating atmospheric scattering might involve calculating view ray sample positions in one or more software threads executing on a graphics processor core and submitting each sample position as an individual shadow texture lookup request to a hardware texture unit. Because such an approach can result in high latencies and substantial reductions in performance, atmospheric scattering simulation has not been deployed to a significant extent in 3D computer graphics applications.